Google's trying to DRM the internet, and we have to make sure they fail
https://par1.iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_UOpen linkView original on programming.dev1105
Comments161https://par1.iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=0i0Ho-x7s_UOpen linkView original on programming.dev
Honest comment with a bit of a question buried in here this novella.. I use Google devices; Pixel Pro's, Pixel watches, Nest hubs, Nest thermostats, etc. This is a understood agreement (not symbiotic) between me and the behemoth that is Alphabet: I pay them for hardware, and use their "free services" that are heavily subsidized by pillaging my data. I know the hardware does it too, and I'm paying.
I've switched most of my networking and cameras to UniFi, my browsers are all Firefox.. The question is what's next? I dislike Apple iPhones but like my wife's MacBook, but I'm a nerd. All of my devices need to "play nice" in their respective ecosystem. I'm tired of having the inbox app, hangouts, etc only to find Google has grown tired or doesn't care and scraps them.
When the iPhone 15 comes out, I was getting the wife that and myself the Pixel 8P. Now I struggle. The "ultra" premium phones (we both care most about camera) are few and defined. I don't want to jump to Apple, it's the same thing, just packaged differently. Ugh.
In every comment thread about the importance of supporting Firefox, there's always at least one comment claiming Firefox is slow, even while I repeatedly see the data say otherwise.
Anecdotally, I've used Firefox, Waterfox, and Librewolf on PC, and none have been slow.
I've used Firefox, Firefox Beta, and Fennec on Android, and if anything they seem faster and easier to use than Chrome (and they actually tend to work like an actual internet browser).
I'm not saying these commenters are all Google sockpuppets, but maybe they're parroting misinformation, or maybe they're using
an Apple OSiOS, where Firefox is basically Safari.It's just really perplexing to me.
I have suspected for a while it is astroturfing. Same as with GIMP and Libre Office where inevitably someone will trash the UI as it's "soooo bad". If you say a lie, and repeat it enough, people start to believe it.
Every time I introduce someone to LibreOffice I half expect them to hate it, and that I'll have to go through the alternative interfaces and try to make them accept it and potentially install OnlyOffice instead if that doesn't help.
Instead, I'm generally met with an "oh, this is nice", before they start typing away.
I get that some of the bigger nerds would prefer something different (I would personally love the power of LibreOffice inside a modern minimalist GTK app), but LibreOffice is working great for most users. Those passionate enough to see an issue with it probably prefer markdown or latex anyway.
I honestly prefer LibreOffice to what Microsoft Office has become.
When I went to grad school, I was told MS Office was required, so I purchased it, but turned out we just used basic word processing and a handful of simple presentations, so I ended up using LibreOffice for everything instead.
Same here. I found the Microsoft ribbon they introduced in 2007 to be a major anti pattern. It didn't make things easier, it made things way harder. Our IT department tried to bust me for not using the official Microsoft software (outlook, excel, word, etc) so I outright uninstalled windows and put fedora on there. Granted, I was trying to do partitions and fucked it up, but whatever. The point is I wanted to get away from their "antivirus" spyware so I could use what worked for me. I got the idea when I saw the Dean of academics was using i3 as her window manager
I can just imagine your IT dept. running into the Dean's office to complain, only to be met with yet more Linux. Hilarious!
"Oh God our eyes. The non proprietary software we didn't buy licenses for. It burns!"
I’m a huge fan of open source but saying the only people saying Gimps UI is bad are astroturfing is insane.
It’s famously controversial and uses UI paradigms that don’t exist in any modern desktop environments.
I'm not, but it's not like it's an occasional thing. Every time it's brought up, it's trashed. Free software that does a better job than anything else free, and folk bash it. Either they like and are motivated by Adobe dominance, or they're useful idiots.
It's balanced to say "great program, but could do with a UI improvement". It isn't to say it's unusable because of UI. I cannot imagine any free software advocate should be proud of taking that line.
Tenacity, not audacity. Audacity got took over by a company with questionable record and tried to add telemetry into it. Tenacity was the OS fork which stayed true to principles.
GIMP may not be your bag, but it's highly used and many find it has much higher quality features than the alternatives. UI may not be popular, but it doesn't prevent it being a solid bit of open source software.
Btw, what steps have you taken to improve open source graphics software? It's easy to bash, it's harder to learn and contribute.
Open source contributors > open source advocates > grateful open source users > almost everyone else > open source critics
One doesn't need to be a dev to have opinions about ease of use of a piece of software, don't be dense.
That is true, but to get free software made by people in their free time and say "this is rubbish" is a little ungrateful.
"Here, have this free food...". " ewww gross, that is so bad".
I love GIMP's UI. It's clean, it's to the point, and it's stayed basically the same for ages!
Damn, this positivity isn't welcome in free software circles! How can I respect you? (Kidding, I think you and your positivity is awesome.)
"Other people who have bad experience ces with something just be asteoturfing."
Ivw consistently had an issue with Firefox that I described in a thread a few days ago that I can't seem to identify or fix. Am I just not allowed to mention it?
Maybe their issue tracker is the best bet, or in a separate question thread about the issues. Raising it in every thread it comes up when people recommending it isn't going to solve the issue or help anything, is it?
No, it won't. I bring it up in this particular thread for 2 reasons.
I don't like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots. I don't think that's at all true, since I've run into multiple problems with the browser myself that I haven't been able to solve.
I brought it up in the previous thread because I think that if people are considering switching, knowing what problems exist is useful. It isn't meant to dissuade anyone, in fact I regularly recommend Firefox to my friends and family. But I don't personally use it because of a pretty major problem, and I don't think it's bad to mention it when the topic comes up.
"I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots."
I did not say this, multiple people have interpreted it this way. It's a little defensive. I said there is a targetted campaign against it where every time it is brought up it is trashed. You may be be a genuine person who is also trashing it, but that doesn't mean there isn't also a targetted campaign at play. I just find it hard to believe that some folk hate FOSS projects so much they have to smash it every time it's brought up. Sounds exhausting.
There is a difference between "it's great software, but i've notice a few issues" and "this project is trash". The second is posted purely with the intent of trying to dissuade people from using it, and all they do is keep people using Chrome, which I think we can all agree has bigger issues.
Also talking about GIMP, plenty of people have said "there's heaps of Photoshop alternatives" yet legit everything on Ubuntu I've has been buggy AF and feature poor. Like I get that FOSS software is hit and miss but this has been really rough
I'm involved in open source software, and of the artists I'm aware of, most use GIMP, not Krita, because it has better features. Krita is a great option, but it doesn't quite have the same features for producing quality art.
I think it depends on the website. There are some websites where chrome will work better either because chrome works better with certain libraries/technologies or because the developers put more time into optimizing for chrome.
On the other hand Firefox might have less bloat around telemetry that gives it an advantage too.
Oh absolutely true, and one would probably notice it more if one uses a lot of Google's services (though Microsoft is even worse in my experience, with nerfing its services if you don't use Edge), but this still doesn't explain why just a normal user would proclaim Firefox is "slow as fuck" without anything to support this, and that's what I'm seeing in nearly every thread that mentions Firefox.
because being faster is what got chrome it's market share in the first place even though it hasn't been true for a very long time if it ever was.
I never switched to chrome because my 50tb of ram wasn't enough to open 2 tabs.
because that's google bot replying
If you want to online shop or research something to buy, or spend money in some way, Chrome and Google search is superior. If you are looking for information, news, anything not requiring payment, Firehox and duck duck go are the best
I'm going to have to strongly disagree here. Trying to research a potential purchase on Google or Bing will net you page after page of Amazaon Affiliate sites peddling junk. I'm into longboarding, and most of the results you'll find trying to Google a decent longboard would result in wasting your money at best, severe injury or death at worst.
It's not just longboards, either. I've noticed these promoted results trying to search PC parts, appliances, dog food, tools, and anything else you might be looking to buy.
There's a reason people started appending searches with "reddit," but honestly it's better just to use a search engine that doesn't net you these results, or ask somewhere else entirely like a community forum. Sadly, most people rely on results from search engines and will end up spending money on junk.
I'm also not sure why using Chrome would make online shopping easier. I literally make all my online purchases through either Firefox proper or Fennec, and I've never had a problem.
Yeah I’ve noticed the same thing. I’ve been deliberately trying to do a bit of Firefox advocacy for a while (cos I honestly believe increasing its userbase is our only chance to avoid google ruining the internet). But yes every time there’s a bunch of people confidently complaining about how bad/slow Firefox is and advocating for brave or chrome.
Initially I thought it was just a bit of historical baggage but it happens very consistently and aggressively so I’ve had the same thought.
Firefox is not “basically Safari” on macOS, that is only true on mobile.
People seem to be unaware that Firefox on Android (not IOS unfortunately) has support for several useful extensions. Ad blocking is the obvious benefit, but I use a Text-to-speech extension every day.
Firefox for iOS might switch to their own engine if Apple relaxes the rules on web browsers. New EU laws will put full pressure on Big Tech.
I think Apple will have to, since they're also going to have to allow sideloading. However, knowing Apple, they'll probably wait right up until the deadline the EU has set before actually giving us what we want.
I did not know this, so thanks for the correction
On top of that, Firefox was recently found to be faster than Chrome.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Google.
I think some people also just haven't used Firefox in a while, and it's gotten better since the last time they used it. I've never had issues on Firefox, however I only became a Firefox user a few years ago. Meanwhile my girlfriend insists it's buggy and slow, but she hasn't used it in many years.
I've noticed a lot of people not wanting to ever revisit older paradigms. Like when the Reddit protests started a lot of people were adament that going back to forum type software would be a disaster and I felt taken aback. I loved that shit. The only reason I saw to do that with Reddit instead of a dedicated forum was because Reddit already had users that could wander into your community and slowly onramp. Here on the fediverse we get the best of both worlds, but there are people who hate the idea that ![email protected] and ![email protected] don't aggregate together even though they might actually be about completely different subject matter because "we don't want to go back to the phpbb days"
Well y know what? Maybe there are parts of the phpbb days that were worthwhile and good. Maybe hosting dedicated servers that are specifically about something is a positive thing as it makes there be more people excited to host a small part of the internet that people can make use of. Maybe what we needed was the easier on ramping, not the centralizes forums.
Maybe that’s like, just your opinion man.
By some metrics, Firefox surpasses Chrome now.
Chrome is a memory hog compared to Firefox lol
This was true when Chrome first came up, they even made those ridiculous ads, which Opera (before they stopped developing their own engine) was ridiculing: https://youtu.be/zaT7thTxyq8
Firefox after they they rewrote their engine to be multithreaded (I think it was called project electron?) is faster than chrome that is currently very bloated.
What saddens me the most that, while there are ignorant people who don't know better and use what are they familiar with, there are also self proclaimed techno geeks, who are equally ignorant and don't seem to remember the times of Internet Explorer.
Edit: here are the chrome ads: https://youtu.be/nCgQDjiotG0
Tbf we're in a new generation of techno geeks who weren't around for a lot of things and lack the full context. I think about that every time a young person chides me for "stealing" from YouTubers or even Google itself by blocking ads.
I(31/m) have a buddy(25/m) who gives me shit for pirating stuff sometimes because he says I'm stealing from the creators. But I'm not because I wasn't gonna pay for it in the first place 😂 I'm more than happy to pay for things and do all the time. I just cancelled my audible sub a couple days ago because I got an email that my credits were going to expire and I needed to use them soon. Like what? I paid you for those. So I just used them on the series I'm currently listening to and spent the rest of the night figuring out how to host my own audible 😂
Targeted ads that are also intrusive. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd even be too much aware of the issues surrounding advertising if they weren't so hellbent on encroaching on the very usability of a site. When YouTube ran banner ads, I didn't really bat an eye. It wasn't until they inserted ads into the videos themselves that I took notice. On top of that, every news outlet started looking like those malware sites people warned you about in the 90s. In a way, I guess I'm thankful that ad agencies became so awful that we had no choice but to become concerned about their impact on our privacy. I can't even imagine using the internet without an adblocker and alternate apps or frontends for the worst offenders.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/ZdirsXNaibo
https://piped.video/ZdirsXNaibo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Worth mentioning that, as much as it pains me to back Apple, Safari is also a good alternative for those it's available for (at least in this regard). It's one of the only browsers other than Firefox not using Chromium. And WebKit, it's renderer, is a pretty badass project.
Chromium and its forks actually all use WebKit as well: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/displaying-a-web-page-in-chrome/
Blink and WebKit completely diverged in 2013 after the fork. That document is virtually identical to its 2012 version and is marked as outdated in several places.
Oh huh, TIL. I had always assumed they were all webkit just due to the amount of compatibility code I've had to implement in CSS with
-webkitstyles. It makes sense that a fork like Blink would be backwards compatible with those thoughIs this up to date? I thought they forked from WebKit ten years ago.
We just need to respond with "objectively wrong: " and copy paste it again if the same person replies.
Also slow compared to what ? I mostly think its just the UI that makes people think it’s slow. Cause I think most browsers load sites at an equal space, or prioritize different kind of caches.
Switch from chrome to Firefox about a year ago. Firefox certainly opens faster on my PC but I don't notice much difference on my android phone.
I switched back and forth between Firefox and Chromium based browsers like Brave and Vivaldi. To be fair Firefox felt slow in comparison for a long time but that changed in the last few months. I think since about Firefox v114 I don't feel a difference anymore and that's why I'm using Firefox now. Best is to tell those people to try Firefox again because it recently became faster (in my experience).
The day adverts are forced on me is the day I quit using the internet for anything other than gaming. I fucking hate adverts.
Hang on, my kittens are scratching at the bathtub and they'll upset by the lack of biscuits.
Try BattleBit
Can confirm, one of the best multiplayer games we have seen in years.
Except they're planning on implementing FaceIT, which is an extremely invasive anticheat. Great game though, play it while you can
They cancelled adding it for the time being
Homestly, as soon as PeerTube gets more users or someone makes a video sharing platform on Gemini, I'll be able to completely abandon Google.
I already use CloudTube, but it's obviously still dependent on YouTube.
It's time for Firefox and others to sue Google for antitrust. When you're using your monopoly to force web "standards" (instead of having an independent third party set standards) that cause developers to stop supporting your rival browser is clearly illegal monopoly actions.
Puh. Mozilla is Google's pet that keeps them out of anti-trust court.
Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it's always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.
But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you're right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.
God damn it. *crumbles in embarrassment.
The Servo fork? Oh I've never heard of that. I'll have to look into it.
Servo Folk. It's one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That's where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn't be Mozilla's problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla's market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.
Have you heard of Electron? It's the use of Chromium's Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn't there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko's way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It's a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink's based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.
https://servo.org/
Oh wow. Thanks for that explanation. It only has made me angrier at Mozilla. They have completely lost their way and forgotten their original mission.
I wonder why Mozilla didn't want their own rendering engine to compete with Blink...
I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people's GPUs more).
And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/
And there's just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that's janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.
From what you've said though there seem to be benefits from cleaning up Gecko in order to make it feasible to turn it into something similar to Electron.
Wouldn't need to take their money if donations were to get high enough (though it might be easier to have a collective org that all kinds of open internet groups could join and donate to). At the moment FF is the only browser that isn't relying on Google's Chromium while also being a real player that isn't OS specific like Safari is. All the FF alts may have their own very good points for making their forks, but they aren't building anything from the ground up. Which puts them in the same spot as all the Chromium based forks with regards to relying on base code needing to stay current. It is of course possible for the Chromium forks to join with FF (and any of its forks that can put their issues with Mozilla aside on this issue) to call for protections.
IE/Microsoft was pulling the same kinds of shit before Chrome, Firefox, and Safari were able to show what could be possible with both actual demands for standards to be followed and that the internet should be open. The open standards are what allowed so many devs of all classes/nationalities/ages/etc to create so many cool things when barriers like money and copyright are removed. Now Google is the Microsoft of the internet and they only respect the rights of corps and rich fucks that don't create anything. Just digital rights versions of landlords. We wouldn't have the options we have now if we waited for those copyrights holders to stop us from just doing shit with technology.
The sad part is that you can't donate to Firefox directly. Only to the Mozilla Foundation, which, I think misguidedly, is trying to become a political advocacy entity. They want to talk about "hate speech" online. They want to make their own AI thing... ugh. I would never deny that society and the internet has big problems. But it seems the organization has been overtaken by people who want to play political games rather than just making free software.
If they focused solely on making a killer browser they might actually be able to dethrown Chromium or at least become more than a niche player.
You can't even donate to Firefox directly. Donation money goes to the corp., which means it goes to CEO pay raises.
P.S. I thought I made my reply to your commment in another thread that I made instead of both yours and my comment being in this one. The post you were replying to inspired me to look up how to file an antitrust complaint with the US government.
Here's what I was referring to:
https://lemmy.world/post/2060683
Let's just make our own open-source browser then
Sigh. Whoever they have working in their DRM department has been an asshole for a long time now.
This is what the third or fourth - minimum - thing like this they've tried to pass in a few years? I actually like Google as a product family but every time they do this it hits me right in the "maybe I should reconsider" department. Its also usually met with a hard resounding no from everyone. Maybe its that they have a task force that is paid well to protect their ad interests and recover some sort of deficit they see in their ad product.
I donate to the EFF to fight things like this at a professional level...also good to point out though that its not just google's fault. If they build a moat for businesses and everyone installs one, that is everyone's fault.
Have been using Firefox forever basically, with a brief departure when Chrome was fairly new, but later returned.
Almost the same for me. Used Firefox since it launched, then when I saw chrome had that thing where you could pull tabs into windows it blew my mind and made the swap. Didn't come back to Firefox until COVID though when I took the time to degoogle my life
I end up switching more and more of my stuff away from Google every time something like this comes out.
ELI5 please?
Will using Firefox fix it?
What can we do to make them fail?
If I could save up my votes to upvote this 5 or 6 times, I would. Great write-up! I'm "stealing" it (with attribution).
This is a depressing reality but I think it's likely this will happen. It makes me so mad Google got as big as they did. Someone needs to tear the fuckers down.
So basically, we're going to have to build a separate internet that rejects this new protocol and allows for alternate browsers. That tactic, combined with piracy and offering everything the big guys charge money for for free, might be enough to draw at least a chunk of the people away from it.
🤔 Actually, if we banded together and had enough people with the know-how and willpower, we could in principle open up our own credit union. Credit unions are alternatives to banks and are specifically designed for shit like this. Just as there are teachers' and firefighters' credit unions, so too could there be one for, say, us Lemmonades.
You wrote all this but you failed to mention that Google's using it's monopoly market position to force web "standards" unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors. The competitors need to sue.
Those complaint websites are tailored to the customers who suffer from the decline in competition. We are suffering from Google using its market position to kill our user experience and options. As I understand, it's classic monopoly abuse.
In the 20th century, the US broke up the Hollywood model where companies owned both the studios and the theaters (how you have 20th century Fox (or just 20th century now) and Fox theaters). Google owning 75% online advertising and 75% of web browser share is a clear conflict of interest and you can see it from how they're pushing things like Manifest V3 via their browser (especially when you consider how Chrome is the default browser on their phones), now that it's the only browser that developers are increasingly starting to support.
If you follow that model, one thing that's going to have to be done is to have Chrome/Chromium browser development be broken away from Google proper. Google can't fund the developers any longer.
Sorry. I keep failing at tracking where each conversation's happening. Here are the complaint websites
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation (Lina Khan's the most vigorous fighter I've seen on these grounds in my lifetime).
https://www.justice.gov/atr/citizen-complaint-center
https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust/procedures/complaints_en
We're having a discussion about it here: https://old.lemmy.world/post/2060683
Thank you for the informative comment
Wow, awesome ELI5 thanks!
I thought Brave doesn't have to implement manifest v3 because they're a fork. They can just rip it out.
We can create a community of people that care about those things & shun people that don't care
If they want to join it's ok, but if they leave or they don't want to join we shun them, because making average people aware doesn't work, they simply don't care
Getting more people to start using Firefox instead of Chrome would be the best way to "vote with our wallets" in this case. Though some of the Chromium forks do make easier sells, but they are much much more likely to just go with whatever Google does by using the same base. So if Google forces something into Chromium in order to keep being able to functioning and being compatible (in web standards, security updates, and the massive extension library). It will just force the use of whatever Google wants, and make Google the de facto boss of how we are "allowed" to use the internet.
What about a small TL;DR?
WTF?!!! Monopoly is always a bad thing, we must remember it!
I don't know anything else, but I have been using firefox for a while, and I can't think of any times where a website didn't work. Seems like a almost perfect drop in replacement for chromium currently, just needs people to do it.
There are some extensions that are only available for Chrome, but beside that this compatibility issue mostly happens with government sites and stuff like that. Since in their case it's you who want something from them and not the other way around, they're free to only check compatibility with something and say that anything else might not work.
Most of the time I stumbled upon such sites requiring IE, but that era seems to be over by now, fortunately.
I'm sure there's a few sites that don't work on Firefox, but I've definitely never ran into one, so its gotta be a very very small issue.
Regarding extensions, that is an issue I've had, but it turns out that some extensions can be ported to Firefox relatively easily. I don't have a clue how to write browser extension's, but all I had to do was make a mozilla developer account and you can convert automatically them there. There are certainly some (or most, not sure) that would require someone to manually port to Firefox though.
All in all, its almost a perfect drop in replacement.
Exactly!
@uthredii It's kind of interesting that this is coming out after Ai stuff like chatgpt and dall-e came out. iirc, those tools scrap a lot of data from the internet from all places [main reason why twitter had it's rate-limiting, if it's true and not bullshit].
I get that scraping is pretty bad, but putting drm on everything just isn't the right way to go about it. It's like nuking all forests to destroy mosquitos; the mosquitos will die, but so will everything.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/oligarchs-against-democracy
ELI5: what is DRM?
Drm- Digital "rights" management, more like digital restrictions management is a thing that tries to make sure the things you own are restricted by someone else. It s the reason some singleplayer games dont work offline, some apps wont let you record them or Blu Ray discs try to stop you from copying them. things that you own. Thwy are controlled by corporations that can say who can use the media. Even if a device is perfectly able to play a movie, Google can not allow it so Neflix would not trust the device. Examples are Denuvo and Widevine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
What part of this can be used for DRM? It looks like its just a crypto-graphically provable User-Agent, assuming I'm reading it right. Am I misunderstanding?
The proposal's explainer dances around the fact that it can be used for that.
Combine them and you have an anti-adblocking feature.
It also says
Which is a whole lot of nothing. Of course you can still install extensions and sure, it can still request attestation, but that doesn't mean it will get it. Also, lol, "legitimacy" my ass.
And the second and forth points are already solved using client certificates.
Sounds like it is a technology that is taking control over your own computer from you i.e. DRM.
Why is anything like this needed?
Fennec on F-Droid is just Firefox minus telemetry and some little proprietary bits. It's otherwise exactly the same.
I like Mull a lot.
this is what is the most annoying thing about Firefox, they dont have the apk on their website like like for the desktop versions.
As Zoanoids* said in Michigan**:
"We're fucked."
*An indie rock band
**A song on their self-titled album
I shared my mp3s d/l'd from Gmusic on Drive. about 1500 or so. public link. haven't looked lately if it still works. if it took off the bandwidth would likely get their attention. I'm sure they at least keep file checksums to use DRM filters on. u/l'd a DVD rip to Ytube and they blocked sharing from there re: copyright. they don't pay artists much from what I've read. can't easily d/l mp3s from youtube music like the old Gmusic. cds/dvds only last a few years so free backups kept on G servers seems a good use of my free 17Gig
You should be able to avoid getting flagged if you encrypt your files with something like cryptomator.
You can with yt-dlp and any of the GUI frontends based on it. I suggest these:
(Anyone who knows any, feel free to suggest more)
People have been very vocal about this in the issues for that repo. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues?q=is%3Aissue
I'd consider installing graphene OS..
Or CalyxOS. Both are totally reliable as daily drivers on pixels. Installation is super easy via web installer and you can still use the original Google cam app that makes your images look as nice as you are used too. Join their respective Matrix chats to get things going and ask the noon questions.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.